This blog is a summary of Frost & Sullivan's extensive report on Cortex as the recipient of the Technology Innovation Leadership award for North American Internal Developer Portals. Read the full report here.

Developers are builders by nature (and profession), so many take pride in building their own solutions to problems from first principles, often using tools developed in open-source projects. So as Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) increased in popularity, it should come as no surprise that interest in open source IDPs increased in kind. While we may not yet have a fully opensource IDP platform, in this blog we’ll cover the open source components and platforms used to build IDPs from scratch.

Improving software health, security, and operational maturity are continuous programs—you’re never really “done” maintaining standards of quality. But what if specific parts of that program feel more urgent? Maybe you want to ensure all software has a README file attached, and at least 1 reviewer assigned... by next month? Hey, you gotta start somewhere!

An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is the engineering system of record for tracking, improving, and building high-quality software. From services and APIs to Kubernetes clusters and data pipelines—IDPs abstract away the complexities of ensuring software security, maturity, production readiness, and more—all using data from your existing tools.

Software production has become exponentially more complex over the last few years as containerization and microservice architectures have exploded. These design decisions are rooted in aspirations of scalability and speed, but left unchecked, have devolved into data model mayhem, development silos, and environment inconsistencies.

Just like personal health, software health is best managed proactively so you can prevent issues before they occur and avoid costly, stressful outages. Cortex helps you track and improve the health of your software with Scorecards and Initiatives. Scorecards quantify software health by aggregating data from multiple sources to give you a continuous view into the health of your system. Initiatives use Scorecards to drive organizational improvement.